I Created a Digital Notebook to Sell Using ChatGPT + Canva AI (here’s how)

I created this digital notebook using ChatGBT and Canva AI, and what surprised me was how little of it I actually had to build manually. Because if you've ever tried creating a digital notebook or a planner from scratch inside Canva, you'll know how fiddly it can be adding all the lines, the sections, and the little design elements yourself. Canva AI did most of that for me in literally one minute, so let me show you exactly how I did it. If you're new here, welcome. I'm Lauren Keys, and I've been creating digital products in Canva for years. And let me tell you, AI has completely changed how quickly I can turn an idea into something I can sell. So I'm going to show you my whole process from creating the prompt inside ChatGBT, taking it into Canva AI, making any edits, and then finally getting the finished notebook ready to sell. So just like most things that I create at the moment, this starts with me simply opening up ChatGBT and rambling my idea through the microphone to text button. So I already know what I want to create, a digital notebook. So what I'm going to do is just explain the look and feel I want, who it's for, the kinds of pages I want inside it. I'm literally giving ChatGBT all the information it needs to understand what I'm trying to create so it can give me a detailed prompt. Now I mentioned that I only want two writing pages to be created. I then describe what I want those pages to look like. Now one thing I'm also going to tell it is that I want the finished notebook to be eight and a half by 11 inches so it can include that in the instructions that it creates for Canva AI. And I'm also going to specifically tell it to leave the cover blank and I'll explain why we're doing that in a minute. So then I tell ChatGBT to organise everything that I've just said into a proper detailed prompt that I can paste into Canva AI. Okay, so ChatGBT has taken all of that and turned it into something more organised. Now let's take this prompt over into Canva AI and see what it gives us. So all you'd need to do is just click on the copy button here. Now to find Canva AI, you just need to head to the left hand side menu here where it says Canva AI. And then all you need to do at the bottom here is just paste that ChatGBT prompt and then hit submit. Okay, so that took one minute and this is what it has created. Let's check out those pages. So that's one page there for the notes and then the second page there, it's more like a journal page. And this is the part that saves me so much time. So I didn't have to sit here manually adding in all these lines and spacing them out or building every little section myself. Canva AI has given me the foundation to work with. Now you'll also notice that the cover is blank at the moment and that's intentional because we're going to come back to that later. There's something else I've deliberately done here. I've only asked Canva AI to design only two pages of the actual notebook pages for me. And that's because I don't want to keep using my Canva AI credits generating the same basic page over and over again. So once I have made my own changes and edits and I'm happy with it, I can just easily go and duplicate the pages myself by coming down to the bottom here and clicking on those three dots there. And then I go to duplicate page and then I basically just do that for however many pages I want. I can also duplicate this page here. And it's totally up to you how many pages that you want. Now you definitely don't need two different page styles in your digital notebook. You can use the same one throughout. I just wanted to mix things up a little bit and add some variety. So overall, I'm really using Canva AI to do the fiddly setup work for me and then I'm taking over from there. Let's come back to this cover page because you might remember I specifically told ChatGBT not to have Canva AI create the image for it and there is a reason for that. For something like this, I want the cover to feel a little more unique to the product I'm creating and I've been getting some incredible results from ChatGBT's image generator lately. So I'm actually going to create the cover artwork separately inside ChatGBT. Now of course, you absolutely can use graphics and images that are already available inside the Canva library, but because those elements are available to everyone, I want to create something completely different. And keep in mind, you can always tell ChatGBT to include a cover in your prompt. I'm just really enjoying ChatGBT's image generation right now and that's why I'm doing it this way. So we're going to jump back into ChatGBT and tell it that I want to create an image of a seamless pattern design for a digital notebook cover, size 8.5 by 11 inches. I then tell it the style I'm looking for, the colors, the overall feel, the types of graphics, make sure the quality is high and then I get it to generate the artwork for my cover. And look at this. This is exactly why I wanted to create the cover separately. So what we're going to do from here is we are going to download this. So we just head up to the top right hand corner and we click on the download little button there. Okay, now we're going to take this image into Canva. Okay, quick note here. So I realized afterwards, like after doing everything for the video, that ChatGBT had actually added this random little bow here on top of the bow, okay, along with some other very minor inconsistencies and I actually considered not publishing this tutorial because of it. But honestly, this is just the reality of working with AI, you're not always going to get the perfect results for the first time. So anytime you notice that ChatGBT has given you an image and there's a little bit of a mistake or an inconsistency, all you need to do is just head up to the comment section there and then you go to the area that you want to fix, you click on it and then you simply just describe the change that you want. So it's a really quick fix and I think it's important to show you that sometimes AI, it can give you a great foundation but you're still going to need to refine those little details. So to upload your cover image into Canva, you're just going to head over to Uploads here on the left hand side menu and click on Upload Files and then you will find that in there and then all you need to do is just click on it and it'll add that in there for you. So we'll just grab that one there and then I'm going to replace the background and the quality of this is already quite high which is very impressive, however I always like to upscale the quality just to make sure the quality is like extra, extra good. So to do that we're just going to click on the image there, we're going to head up to Edit, edit the image and then we're going to go over to here where it says Upscale. So that's been upscaled, I'm just going to zoom in a little bit just to check that out and that is looking really, really good. So from here I will then add in the title of the notebook, add in some text, you can get really creative here. So I'm just going to jump over to Elements here and I'm just going to type in Text Label. So I quite like this little graphic here, now as you can see there is a crown symbol there, so this particular graphic is only available to pro users. So I am going to use that because I am a pro user and I think that matches really, really well there because it's got the pink lining in there, yep that will do. And then I'm just going to add some text and you can call your notebook whatever you want, I'm going to call it for this tutorial purpose, it's just going to be called My Notebook. And I've gone with this font here, it's called Deco, so it's like that handwriting, sort of like that childlike handwriting look. AI has done a lot of the heavy lifting for us but I still don't just take whatever it gives me and call it finished. Right, so this is where I will go through and I will really make this my own. So I will go in and just basically remove things, add things in that I don't like, so you know let's just say I wanted to add in another graphic there of maybe like a pink perfume bottle. I'm just going to go into Elements and type in Pink Perfume and here's what's come up and I actually like this one here, so we're just going to use that, we'll make it smaller and then get rid of those cherries, pop that one there for example. Now if you are ever concerned with the quality of the graphics and images that Canva AI creates for you, you can always simply just upscale them like what I showed you before or you can simply just go into Elements and search for a similar graphic. So if I type in Pink Ribbon and then choose something from here to replace that, so I could use that one there instead of that one and keeping in mind that this here may not look as bright because it is a watercolour image. I specifically asked ChatGPT to make the prompt so that the graphics have a watercolour look to them. So that's just another way you can swap out graphics if you're not happy with what Canva AI has generated for you. Now I'm actually going to make some changes to this page because I am not loving these watercolour graphics here, so I'm just going to delete all of those. I'm also going to change the font of this to match the first page there and that one there is called Great Vibes and already that looks so much better and then I really like this perfume image here, so I'm just going to copy that and then I'll delete that one and then I'll paste that one in there. So even though I'm using AI to get the notebook created much faster, I still have full control over how the finished product actually looks and if you're creating these notebooks to sell, here's something that I wouldn't do. I wouldn't start completely from scratch every single time. So once I've got a notebook that I'm happy with, I can simply make a copy of the design and use that as a starting point for another one. So maybe I want a completely different style. I can create another unique cover, change the colours or fonts, make whatever changes I need while keeping that basic notebook structure that I've already created. And before you start creating lots of these, please just make sure that you're checking what size you actually need for wherever you're planning to sell or use them. For this one, I'm creating it at 8.5 by 11 inches. Okay, so I'm happy with the notebook now. We've got the cover, we've built out the inside pages and the last thing that I need to do is get it ready to sell. So to download this, you would head up to share in the top right hand corner and you are going to download it as a PDF file, then hit download. You would then upload this PDF into your chosen selling platform. Now, creating digital products with AI is one thing, but will people actually buy them? Well, I decided to test that too. So I created printable planners with ChatGPT. I listed them on Etsy and I waited to see if anyone would actually buy one. So watch this video next to see what happened.